Alright just a few days ago i decided to get linux and play around with it and since im on dialup and dont have anymoney I got Zipslack and I have a hard drive with windows xp pro and then another hard drive with windows ME. XP is my master HD ... anyways After looking around online I dont think I can install this with Windows XP so my question is can I just delete my ME OS and put ZipSlack on my other hard drive? If not what options do I have i am really confused at this moment on what to do.

Thanks !

Linux should run on its own partition. You could just delete ME and create a partition for Linux on that drive, or you could resize your XP or ME partition to make room for Linux.

If you decide to resize your XP partition you should look at this tool.

I don't know about Zipslack, but during the Debian installation I was able to repartition parts of my drive without affecting my Windows partition.

well see basically the problem is the only way to run zipslack you have to be in true DOS and XP doesnt have that so is there a boot disk or something I can get to boot up DOS and run it or what? This would be like 100 times easier if I had Win98.

If you don't have a FAT partition already it's pretty pointless to use a Linux distro that works off of a FAT partition. If ME uses FAT then just install it there. Otherwise, if you have to repartition anyways you might as well get the benefits of a FS like ReiserFS or XFS (permissions, performance, journalling).

Yeah my ME partition is on FAT .... how can I load true DOS on ME? I booted ME a minute ago and I couldnt find a way... Id really like to delete ME all together and just install linux on there but then I dont know how I would access DOS to load it... sorry for not knowing much ive never really messed with this before

It's usually easier to stay away from DOS when installing Linux. The usual method is to just burn a CD and boot off of it. You can do it another way if you want, but from my experiences a bootable CD is the easiest.

I just realized that you're on Dialup. I think that Zipslack is a bad idea unless you already have a working DOS partition. Hopefully you didn't already download it; you can still use it if you want, though.

I like the Debian netinstall. It's a 100MB iso that will just get you a basic working system and let you download only the extras that you want. Other distros may have similar light installation methods.

If you want to get DOS working from a ME partition, a Windows forum might be more knowlegable about it.

well what other slackware can I get I have dialup which sucks so anything over 50MB is pushing it unless i can get it off an FTP or something that supports resume, finding one that wouldnt have to be installed through DOS would be great id just delete ME totally not like I ever use it for anything

You should reread my last post; I basically rewrote it.

Something like Debian's Netinstall iso would be good for you. I looked through one of the Slackware FTP sites and didn't see anything quite like it. All the major distros should have some FTP mirrors so you can resume, but you still want to keep downloads as low as possible. (Thinking about dialup makes me not hate my Uni's always-overcrowded connection. It may be ten times slower than my home connection, but it's still a lot better than dialup.)

I found this readme on a Slackware FTP site. It talks about getting it to fit on one CD by excluding Gnome or KDE. KDE alone is 360MB+, so if you choose to use a lightweight window manager like windowmaker or fluxbox you can save a ton of download space.

I'm just curious, does Slackware have a package manager that automatically takes care of dependencies? I don't even think about them, but with some distros I know you have to track down other packages yourself. If slackware deals with that for you it would be no problem to leave out both major DE's.